Scenarioplanning
Royal Dutch Shell, commonly known as Shell, is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company. It is the seventh largest company in the world as of 2016, in terms of revenue, and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors".
The problem: Climate change has been a hot topic for the last decades. To work against this, nations have decided to decrease the amount of CO2 pollution in the next years. Shell, however, is a large stakeholder in this situation. Because the decrease of CO2 will remain an important topic in the future, Shell is curious what a CO2 free world would look like.
Our mission: the task as formulated by Jeremy Betham (VP global business environment and head scenrio’s at Shell):
“Living in a carbon free city”, is to look at the future city landscape from the personal experience perspective. What does city living actually look like, how would you experience it as an individual? This would incorporate the impact of work, transport, free time, energy use, accommodation, shared economy, digitization, health, education etc. and of course the fact that inevitably energy efficiency will be central. Indeed, as there will necessarily be a trade-off between liveability as we know it today and energy efficiency, compact living, shared access to materials and services – how does that trade-off still look attractive?
Scenario planning
In this project, we didn't accurately go through the innovation cycle. Instead, we took different steps of scenarioplanning. First, we gathered 100 events that were taking place at the moment or would take place in the future. We then categorized these into different 'driving forces', like sustainability, democratization and digitalization. Next, we ordered the list of driving forces (about 20) by two criteria: certainty and impact. The two driving forces with the highest impact and the lowest certainty were picked out and placed in a figure with two axes. The horizontal line in the figure resembled the two extremes of one driving force and the vertical line resembled the extremes of the other. This lead to four different scenario's. The driving forces that would define our scenario were: extremely high international co-operation and an extremely bad economy.
The next step was to develop our future scenario, thinking of details and influences on daily personal lives; not forgetting about the carbon free aspect. When our scenario was complete, it was time to present it to the class. We decided to present it in a storytelling manner, with a narrator and images in the back as visual support. Unfortunately, there is no video footage of this presentation.